Tuesday, October 4, 2011

I've been trying to understand this whole Node.js thing that's been going on for the past few days. It's taught me a lot about how the Node.js community tries to reason about problems, and perhaps what's the real problem with Node.

It began with a relatively short rant by Ryan Dahl. Ryan talk's about how he's mad at complex software, which is at least an arguable position. I liked his rant, but Ted Dziuba did not.

Ted's argument centered around the problem of doing non-trivial computation within the event loop of a system like Node, and how that would affect the performance of the system. To illustrate this point, he gave an intentionally deoptimized Fibonacci function, along with the boldface caveat "Yes, I know there's a closed form solution. Shouldn't you be in front of a mirror somewhere, figuring out how to introduce yourself to her?"

Reading through the lines of Ted's trolling, his point is "I'm not specifically talking about Fibonacci. I'm talking about non-trivial computation as a general problem in Node." He specifically chose a slow algorithm to illustrate his point. However, what was the Node community's reaction?

Redditor "headzoo" suggests that we provide a "non-blocking solution" by unrolling the Fibonacci loop and execute one iteration of the Node.js event loop, calculating one iteration for each I/O multiplexing system call Node is making. When Ted Dziuba asked "Have you taken epoll into your heart?," I think he had no idea of the depths Node people actually have.

I don't really get what's going on in Node people's heads here. I think they seriously believe that throwing computation into the middle of an event loop is a good idea, because Node's event loop is FAST!!#$#! funroll-loops + nextTick = LUDICROUS SPEED!!

This crap is absolutely insane. For each iteration of the loop, Node is making an expensive system call. It's also defeating all of the mechanisms that V8's impressive JIT would use to optimize this problem, as substantiated by the previously mentioned Nodian's roflbenchmark. Clearly this is a very bad idea. But wait, it gets worse!

It wouldn't take long before another Node.js fan put together a Github project for this technique, which also added an "optimization": memoization! In addition to unrolling each iteration of the Fibonacci function to run within the event loop, it now caches the nth result. Now let's throw ApacheBench at it and see how fast Node can serve the precomputed result where n = 100.

Okay, so mistakenly implementing an algorithm this pathologically bad when you're trying to prove a point to someone who's just trolling you is pretty bad, right? But it gets worse.

After pointing this out, a member of the Node.js community (post now deleted) suggested I might have an obsolete version of Node with a 1GB heap limit (because Node uses a VM targeted at client-side JavaScript where 1GB heaps are an uncommon use case, but hey, let's throw it on the server!) and that I recompile without the 1GB restriction so that this retarded algorithm can continue eating up all my system RAM. He says this as if this is a good idea instead of, I dunno, using a better algorithm.